For the past year, Florida real estate agents have been actively courting wealthy Northeasterners who took a hit from the Trump administration’s tax overhaul. Now signs are emerging that some of those disgruntled taxpayers are indeed jumping at the chance to cut their tax bill by moving to Florida.

Luxury sales are slowing across the country, from New York to California, but they’re rising in South Florida. Million-dollar home sales in the fourth quarter jumped 7.5 percent from a year earlier in Miami-Dade County, 17 percent in Broward County and 15 percent in Palm Beach County. In Fort Lauderdale, the median price for a luxury condo jumped 26 percent to almost $1.6 million, according to data on the top 10 percent of sales released today by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

Donald Trump’s tax overhaul got Bloomington, Illinois, executive Jim Morris looking at South Florida for a $10 million-plus mansion with his own piece of beach, low property levies and no state income tax.

“It’s not just the weather,” he said. “The advantages of the tax code are greatly appreciated.”

While the tax advantages of relocating to Florida vary depending on income and where the people are moving from, residents of high-tax states who are able to relocate are checking it out, say local brokers. Morris, 58, said he may even bring his packaging company’s headquarters with him. Hedge fund managers, retirees and other wealthy folks from high-tax states are also looking at Florida.

Foreign Buyers

Real estate brokers in the state are targeting buyers from the Northeast and other parts of the country with higher property and state taxes as Latin American buyers have pulled back amid political and economic unrest at home and a plunge in their currencies against the dollar. Last year’s federal tax bill, among other changes, limits deductions for state and local tax. The savings would mainly accrue to those making more than $1 million per year.

“New Yorkers are the new foreign buyers in Florida,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel. “For people who were looking for a reason to make domicile in Florida, the new tax laws made that decision easier.”

The data suggest Broward and Palm Beach counties — typical destinations for
Northeasterners — are outperforming majority Spanish-speaking Miami-Dade. But David Martin, developer Terra’s founder and chief executive, said to beware of distortions from a handful of high-end condominium development closings.

New Projects

“New projects in Broward are going to skew your statistics more than they will
in Miami,” he said. “All three counties are going to be benefiting from this tax migration.”

Jorge Perez, the billionaire Related Group chief executive, said he sold 83 of the high-end condos at his Auberge Beach Residences & Spa in Fort Lauderdale last year. He added that foreign buyers are still coming to Florida and Broward County might finally be shedding its reputation as purely appealing to Americans.

“That spurt from international buyers has helped Fort Lauderdale a lot, because before it was purely a local and national market,” he said.

Michelle Noga, an agent at William Raveis South Florida who is working with Morris from Bloomington, said customers have been paying close attention to Florida residency requirements.

“I just finished a showing with some people from Boston,” she said of the retirees. “They want to live there for six months and one day.”

The tax changes have been good for the Palm Beach Hedge Fund Association, which has seen its membership swell to 1,700, increasing 10 to 15 percent over the past year, according to founder Dave Goodboy.

Hedge Funds

“I get phone calls on a weekly basis with people wanting to relocate here, both firms and individuals,” Goodboy said. “About 80 percent of our members are in the area. The rest are interested in coming here.”

Morris and his wife, Lori, began searching in Palm Beach about nine months ago. While most of his more than 400 employees work in manufacturing plants, he has been talking to the 20 employees in the company headquarters about a possible move, he said.

“We’re looking for the right estate — I want my own piece of beach, basically,” Morris said. “Right now, we pay a lot of state income tax.”

(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might not have seen eye to eye with Joseph Overton, the late free-market advocate. But she has a firm grasp of the concept for which he is best known: the Overton Window. The term refers to the range of ideas that are at any given time considered worthy of public discussion. Thanks largely to her, the Overton Window on tax rates has just been moved significantly to the left.

Ocasio-Cortez, the mediagenic 29-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., is the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. In an appearance on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper that aired on Jan. 6, she was talking up the Green New Deal, a plan to move the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Cooper challenged her by saying the program would require raising taxes. “There’s an element, yeah, where people are going to have to start paying their fair share,” she replied. Asked for specifics, she said, “Once you get to the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.”

Seventy percent! For perspective, the top rate under the tax law that passed in December 2017 is 37 percent. And now, suddenly, a number so extreme that no one in polite society dared utter it became a focal point of debate. Ocasio-Cortez’s fans—she has 2.4 million followers on Twitter alone—loved it. Some pundits dug up economic research defending rates in the 70 percent range. Others pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez was actually lowballing the historical comparison: Top rates were 90 percent or higher as recently as the 1960s. Defenders of low tax rates heaped abuse on her, which backfired on them by inflaming her supporters.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is the Darling of the Left, Nightmare of the Right
What Ocasio-Cortez understands is that getting an idea talked about, even unfavorably, is a necessary, if insufficient, step on the path to adoption. (President Trump also gets this.) “It’s the easiest thing to say, ‘No, we can’t change anything,’ ” says Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who recently retired from Columbia University. “Most of the big ideas in American history started among radical groups who were told, ‘No, you’re never going to be able to achieve that.’ ” Foner sees parallels between the strategies of today’s left-leaning Democrats and the radical Republicans who fought slavery before the Civil War, “which was put out an agenda, be aware that you can’t just accomplish it all at once, obviously, but change the political discourse by pushing your agenda and then work with those who are willing to do some of it.”

Ocasio-Cortez was actually less radical than she could have been on 60 Minutes. She passed up the opportunity to move the Overton Window on another of her pet issues: budget deficits. She adheres to a doctrine called Modern Monetary Theory that’s catching on among young, left-leaning politicians and older policymakers alike. Its counterintuitive core idea is that deficits don’t matter if you borrow in your own currency, just as long as they don’t cause inflation. Unless the economy is at risk of overheating, MMTers say, paying for a new government program doesn’t require cutting another or raising taxes.

Ocasio-Cortez could have said, “No, Anderson, we wouldn’t need to raise taxes to pay for the Green New Deal. But I want to raise taxes anyway, because I believe in redistributing money from the rich to the poor.” That really would have lit up the internet. Randall Wray, an MMT theorist who’s a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, wrote in an email that he was “a bit disappointed” that Ocasio-Cortez connected tax hikes to the Green New Deal. Stephanie Kelton, another MMT theorist and Bernie Sanders’s economic adviser during his race for the Democratic nomination in 2016, says she thinks reducing inequality is the real reason Ocasio-Cortez favors higher rates on the rich: “It’s kind of a recognition that levels of income and wealth inequality parallel those of the 1920s.”

More millionaires call the Big Apple home than any other city in the world.

New York had the largest population of high-net-worth individuals, whose net worth in assets totals between $1 million and $30 million, according to a report released Wednesday by global wealth consultancy Wealth-X. Some 978,810 high-net-worth, or HNW, individuals reside in New York. That’s nearly double the HNW population of Tokyo (593,025 individuals), which came in at No. 2 on Wealth-X’s ranking.

New York has more high-net-worth individuals than any other city in the world, and it also has the largest population of ultrawealthy people. The latter group comprises those with assets exceeding $30 million.
Not only does New York have more HNW individuals than any other city in the world, but it also has the largest population of ultrawealthy people, defined as those who have assets worth more than $30 million. It regains this distinction after losing the title to Hong Kong in 2017. However, the tenuous relationship between the U.S. and China roiled the wealthy elite in Hong Kong, causing the HNW population there to drop by more than 11% last year.

Wealth-X’s findings were based on its proprietary database of HNW individuals, which includes information such as the individuals’ financial assets, career histories, family backgrounds and philanthropic endeavors, among other data points.

Read more: Some of the wealthiest people on the planet got a financial wake-up call in 2018

Overall, America had six of the top 10 HNW cities, per Wealth-X’s list. Dallas–Fort Worth, which has seen its wealth grow thanks in part to the strong energy sector, entered the list for the first time this year.

Here is how the full rankings shook out:

• New York (978,810 HNW individuals, down 0.6% from 2017)
• Tokyo (593,025 HNW individuals, down 3.3% from 2017)
• Los Angeles (576,255 HNW individuals, down 0.7% from 2017)
• Hong Kong (391,595 HNW individuals, down 11.1% from 2017)
• London (372,270 HNW individuals, up 2.7% from 2017)
• Chicago (353,775 HNW individuals, down 0.8% from 2017)
• Paris (345,175 HNW individuals, up 4.5% from 2017)
• San Francisco (314,055 HNW individuals, down 0.4% from 2017)
• Washington, D.C. (301,495 HNW individuals, down 1.3% from 2017)
• Dallas (298,220 HNW individuals, up 0.1% from 2017)

While the list of cities with the wealthiest populations may not appear diverse today, that could soon change. China boasts 32 of 40 fastest-growing HNW cities in the world currently, according to Wealth-X. “There is still no representation in the top 10 from China, whose largest city for UHNW and HNW is Shanghai, with 123,000 HNW individuals,” the report noted. “But this belies the meteoric growth.”

Nigeria has the fastest-growing high-net-worth population in the world, with the number of residents there worth $1 million to $30 million expected to increase 16.3% by 2023.
Moreover, the concentration of extremely wealthy individuals in certain cities could be simply a reflection of different cultural approaches to wealth. “London and Paris are the European representatives in the top 10, with nucleated concentrations of HNW in their capital cities, in contrast to a more distributed pattern of wealth, for example, in German cities,” the report’s authors wrote.

Indeed, while the U.S. does have the world’s largest HNW population, China ranks second, followed by a wide assortment of countries including Japan, Germany, South Korea and Australia. And Nigeria has the fastest-growing high-net-worth population in the world, with the number of residents there worth $1 million to $30 million expected to increase 16.3% by 2023.

ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia man who had detailed plans to use an anti-tank rocket to storm into the White House was arrested in a sting Wednesday after he traded his car for guns and explosives, authorities said.

Hasher Jallal Taheb, 21, of Cumming was arrested Wednesday and is charged with attempting to damage or destroy a building owned by the United States using fire or an explosive, U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak said.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Taheb had an attorney who could comment on the allegations.

A local law enforcement agency contacted the FBI in March after getting a tip from someone who said Taheb had become radicalized, changed his name and planned to travel abroad, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit filed in court.

The affidavit says Taheb told a confidential FBI source in October that he planned to travel abroad for “hijra,” which the agent wrote refers to traveling to territory controlled by the Islamic State. Because he didn’t have a passport, he couldn’t travel abroad and told the FBI source that he wanted to carry out an attack in the U.S. against the White House and the Statue of Liberty.

He met with the undercover agent and the FBI source multiple times last month and was also in frequent contact using an encrypted messaging application, the affidavit says.

During one meeting with the agent and the source, Taheb “advised that if they were to go to another country, they would be one of many, but if they stayed in the United States, they could do more damage,” the affidavit says. Taheb “explained that jihad was an obligation, that he wanted to do as much damage as possible, and that he expected to be a ‘martyr,’ meaning he expected to die during the attack.”

At another meeting, he showed the undercover agent a hand-drawn diagram of the ground floor of the West Wing of the White House and detailed a plan for attack, the affidavit says. He asked the undercover agent to obtain the weapons and explosives needed to carry out the attack, and they discussed selling or exchanging their cars to pay for them.

Taheb told the undercover agent they needed a “base” where they could regroup and where he could record a video to motivate people: “He stated he would be the narrator, clips of oppressed Muslims would be shown, and American and Israeli flags would be burned in the background.”

Last week, Taheb told the undercover agent he wanted to pick up weapons this week and drive directly to Washington to carry out the attack, investigators said.

Taheb said they would approach the White House from the back road, causing a distraction for police and then would proceed into the White House, using an anti-tank weapon to blow open a door and then take down as many people and do as much damage as possible, the affidavit says.

Taheb told the undercover agent he had never shot a gun but could learn easily and also said he had watched some videos of how grenades explode, authorities said.

Taheb met with the FBI source and undercover agent on Wednesday in a parking lot in Buford to exchange their cars for semi-automatic assault rifles, three explosive devices with remote detonators and an anti-tank rocket, the affidavit says.

A second FBI source met them and inspected the vehicles, and a second FBI undercover agent arrived in a tractor trailer with weapons and explosives that had been rendered inert by the FBI. The undercover agent and Taheb talked about the guns, how to arm and detonate the explosives and how to use the anti-tank rocket, the affidavit says.

Taheb and the undercover agent and FBI source whom he believed to be part of his group turned over their car keys to the second confidential source and then loaded the inert explosives and guns into a rental vehicle, the affidavit says. Then, after they got into the car and closed the doors, agents arrested Taheb.

Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Tags: Washington, D.C., Georgia

In a tragic case illustrating the sinister effects of online porn, a 16-year-old girl’s bowel was so badly injured during group anal sex that she needs to use a colostomy bag for the rest of her life.

The teen reportedly suffered the life-changing injury while copying scenes seen in violent porn, according to an Australian Broadcasting Company News investigation.

But, sadly, Australia’s national broadcaster was told that the girl’s horrific experience was just one in a string of serious injuries to result from porn-addicted Australians trying to imitate aggressive sex they’ve watched online.

Australia GP and former Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president Dr. Bastian Seidel told the ABC he has seen first-hand how copying behavior seen on porn videos can go dangerously wrong.

“We have seen anal fissures more and more. I’ve seen that more in women, so that’s caused by men having anal sex with women,” he said.

The ABC’s hard-hitting investigation also revealed the horrendous experience of a woman, “Sarah,” whose former boyfriend forced her into having anal sex.

The 41-year-old was left with nerve damage to her bowel and can no longer cope with hugging her mom because she was so traumatized by the rape.

“In pornography, it’s not how it is in real life. It’s just not how it is. It looks like they enjoy it, but it really hurts,” she said.

Copycat abuse

Experts and teachers have all agreed that porn-addicted men are making their girlfriends suffer in an attempt to copy what they see online.

Cyber safety expert Susan McLean, who advises the Australian government and speaks at schools, was among several experts revealing how high school girls were being seriously injured when their boyfriends try to imitate what they’ve watched in porn.

She said their copycat behavior involved using objects and tended to be “quite violent.”

The girls “often feel very powerless to say ‘no,’” McLean added.

The ABC said Australia ranks ninth for visitors to websites such as PornHub behind India, the UK and the US — but also boasts one of the longer average viewing times.

Porn education organization Reality And Risk told the broadcaster its research showed that close to 90 percent of the most popular porn viewed includes physical aggression.

This issue has also been delved into by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology senior lecturer Meagan Tyler, who said overseas pornographers, particularly in the US, have deliberately made their content more violent.

She said many producers would say the porn they put out is based on demand from their mainly male viewers.

As a result of boundaries being continually pushed, porn was showing “things like double and triple anal … and things like choking as well.”

The broadcaster spoke with Australian pornographer Garion Hall, who said that in America, porn falls under the country’s freedom of speech rules, so they can get away with “producing some pretty extreme stuff”.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mocked her critics in a Washington Post interview, telling them to “enjoy being exhausted for the next two years while we run train on the progressive agenda.”

According to Urban Dictionary — not always a reliable source, but useful in this case — “run train” is colloquially defined as “to gangbang” someone with “several friends.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s pledge to gang bang the progressive agenda comes in the transcript of an extensive interview with the Post, in which she was asked about “conservative media” setting her up as “another boogeyman on the left.”

“I also think it’s encouraging because this is my sixth day in Congress and they’re out of all their artillery,” she said, referencing the fake photo of her feet in a bathtub that was covered — controversially — by the Daily Caller. “The nude is supposed to be like the bazooka. You know, like, ‘We’re going to take her down.’ Dude, you’re all out of bullets, you’re all out of bombs, you’re all out of all this stuff.”

“What have you got left?” she asked. “I’m six days into the term, and you already used all your ammo. So enjoy being exhausted for the next two years while we run train on the progressive agenda.”

It’s unclear whether Ocasio-Cortez — the freshman congresswoman and democratic socialist from New York — is aware that “run train” is a gang bang reference.

AOC also remarked on the intense scrutiny she receives, telling the Post it’s “physically exhausting.”

“The actual transition process is exhausting, but then the attention is enormous too,” she said.

Read the full interview here.

[H/t Jeff Blehar]

Seven men have been killed in a shooting attack at a bar in Mexico’s Caribbean coast resort city of Playa del Carmen, authorities said Monday.

State and local police said the attack occurred late Sunday at the “Las Virginias” bar in a low-income section relatively far from the beachside tourist zone. Six men were found shot to death in the bar, and another died at a local hospital.

READ MORE: Ontario man claims he was attacked, robbed in Playa Del Carmen

One man was wounded but survived the attack. He told police he was drinking beer with friends when gunshots broke out. The attackers have not yet been identified.

Playa del Carmen is located on the coast facing the island of Cozumel, Mexico’s leading cruise ship destination. Once a quiet fishing and ferry town, Playa del Carmen has grown exponentially in the last two decades, with lower-income neighbourhoods springing up on the inland side of the coastal highway.

The resort is midway between Cancun, to the north, and Tulum, to the south, in the coastal state of Quintana Roo, which has seen homicides more than double in the last year, with 688 killings in the first 11 months of 2018, compared to 322 in the same period of 2017. At that rate, Quintana Roo could end 2018 with a homicide rate of about 50 per 100,000, on a par with El Salvador.

The Caribbean coast – especially Cancun and the area south known as the “Riviera Maya” – had long been largely spared the drug violence affecting other areas, but that no longer appears to be the case. Local sources report that the feared Jalisco cartel has moved into the region, disputing control with local gangs.

In September, two Mexican marines were found stabbed to death in Cancun. In a single day in August, police found eight bodies strewn on the streets of Cancun.

READ MORE: Killings continue but travel agents keep selling trips to Cancun

In January 2017, gunmen attacked the state prosecutors’ office in Cancun, killing four people. A day before that, a shooting at a music festival in Playa del Carmen left three foreigners and two Mexicans dead.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico issued a brief travel warning for Playa del Carmen in March. A February 2018 blast on a ferry apparently caused by an explosive device injured 26 people, including several American citizens.

That has sparked fears that the Caribbean resorts could come to resemble the faded Pacific coast resort of Acapulco. The bloody violence in Acapulco that flared in 2006 eventually earned it a level-four “do not travel” warning from the U.S. Department of State.

Still, violence in Playa del Carmen is still far from Acapulco levels. In 2017, Acapulco had a homicide rate of 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest in Mexico and the world.

WATCH: Canada issues travel advisory for Mexican tourist destination ahead of spring break

7 killed after shooting in Mexico’s resort city Playa del Carmen